Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that " the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human ; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original ".

Vasari said Bramante let him in secretly, and the scaffolding was taken down in 1511 from the first completed section.

* Nearly four centuries later Giorgio Vasari wrote: " Guglielmo, according to what is being said, in year 1174 with Bonanno as sculptor, laid the foundations of the belltower of the cathedral in Pisa.

According to Leonardo's contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, "... after he had lingered over it four years, left it unfinished ...." Leonardo, later in his life, is said to have regretted " never having completed a single work ".

Vasari, who claimed Signorelli as a relative, described him as kindly, and a family man, and said that he always lived more like a nobleman than a painter.

Pope Gregory XIII sent the leader of the massacres a Golden Rose, and said that the massacres " gave him more pleasure than fifty Battles of Lepanto, and he commissioned Vasari to paint frescoes of it in the Vatican ".

Five hundred years earlier Vasari had said " The whole world came running when the vault was revealed, and the sight of it was enough to reduce them to stunned silence.

* The Stoning of St. Stephen ( Santo Stefano, Genoa ): " Giulio never did a finer work than this ," said Vasari.

It is evidence of the facility with which he acquired the rapid execution of a scene-painter that he was selected to co-operate with Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Battista Franco and Francesco de ' Rossi ( Il Salviati ) to re-decorate the Porta San Sebastiano at Rome as a triumphal arch ( 5 April 1536 ) in honour of Charles V. Giorgio Vasari, who saw the battle-pieces which Heemskerk then produced, said they were well composed and boldly executed.

* Madonna of the Divine Love, school of Raphael, which Vasari said had been commissioned by the cardinal's father, Leonello da Carpi ; it passed to the Farnese and in now at the Capodimonte Museum, Naples.

Of the four empanelled tondi or roundels depicting each of the evangelists, two were said by Vasari to have been painted by Bronzino.

Poggio Reale, which Vasari said was designed by Giuliano da Maiano and which was laid out in the 1480s, has utterly disappeared and no extensive description has survived.

Decades later, Vasari reported, " At Poggio Reale da Maiano laid out the architecture of that palazzo, always considered a most beautiful thing ; and to fresco it he brought there Pietro del Donzello, a Florentine, and Polito his brother who was considered in that time a good master, who painted the whole palazzo, inside and out, with the history of the said king.

He is said to have been instructed in painting by Salviati and Bronzino, in sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti, in architecture by Giorgio Vasari, and to have learned miniature painting under Giulio Clovio.

He studied at Rome, it is said under Michelangelo, and assisted Giorgio Vasari in painting the hall of the Palazzo della Cancelleria.

Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo " taught him a great deal about painting ", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d ' Oggione and Boltraffio.

Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime ; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries.

According to Vasari, his father placed him in the workshop of the Umbrian master Pietro Perugino as an apprentice " despite the tears of his mother ".

According to Vasari, Raphael's premature death on Good Friday ( April 6, 1520 ), which was possibly his 37th birthday, was caused by a night of excessive sex with Luti, after which he fell into a fever and, not telling his doctors that this was its cause, was given the wrong cure, which killed him.

* Casa Vasari ( in Via XX Settembre ) an older house rebuilt in 1547 by Giorgio Vasari and frescoed by him ; now open as a museum, it also contains 16th-century archives.

A half-century after his death Correggio's work was well known to Vasari, who felt that he had not had enough " Roman " exposure to make him a better painter.

The remains as we see them give evidence of the artist's power both of imitating natural detail with minute fidelity and of spacing his figures in a landscape with a large sense of air and distance ; and they amply verify two separate statements of Vasari concerning him: that " he delighted in drawing landscapes from nature exactly as they are, whence we see in his paintings rivers ; bridges, rocks, plants, fruits, roads, fields, cities, exercise grounds, and an infinity of other such things ," and that he was an inveterate experimentalist in technical matters.

According to Vasari, Andrea resolved never to touch the brush again because Leonardo, his pupil, had far surpassed him, but later critics consider this story apocryphal.

It has been suggested that Vasari was confusing this murder case with another one involving a " Domenico di Matteo " who was killed by an " Andreino " in 1448, but the archival record shows that this is a misreading: " A cursory examination reveals two things: first, that the name of the dead painter is not Domenico di Matteo, but Domenico di Marco ; and second, and much more crucially, that there is no mention of him having been killed by a painter named Andrea or Andreino.

Vasari relates that Nicola Pisano constantly studied these Roman remains and the Roman sculptures from Augustan times seem to have marked a deep impression on him.

Vasari credited him also of the design and reconstruction of the Ponte Vecchio, which is however disputed by modern scholars.

According to Vasari, " This casting, which is admirable, acquired very great fame and repute for him by reason of the proportion and grace that it shows in all its parts ; and whosoever observes this work well can see that the design is good, and that the craftsman was a man of judgment and of practised ability.

Interestingly, Vasari does not attribute the famed Pisan frescoes now associated with Buonamico to the painter, but rather, credits him with four frescoes at the Camposanto depicting the beginning of the world through the building of Noah's Ark, which later scholars have instead attributed to Piero di Puccio of Orvieto.

Lucas enjoyed a great reputation in his day, and Giorgio Vasari ( who called him Lucas van Hollandt ) even rated him above Dürer.

:" At this time Giorgio Vasari a great friend of Giulio, though they only knew each other by report and by letters, passed through Mantua on his way to Venice to see him and his works.

Giulio was so delighted that he spent four days in showing Vasari all his works, especially the plans of ancient buildings at Rome, Naples, Pozzuolo, Campagna, and all the other principal antiquities designed partly by him and partly by others.

At Rome in 1532 he painted the chapel of Cardinal Enckenvoirt in the church of Santa Maria dell ' Anima ; and Giorgio Vasari, who knew him, says with truth that he fairly acquired the manner of an Italian.

Renaissance art biographer Giorgio Vasari does not even mention Fiorenzo's name, though he probably refers to him when he says that Cristofano, Perugino's father, sent his son to be the shop drudge of a painter in Perugia, who was not particularly distinguished in his calling, but held the art in great veneration and highly honoured the men who excelled therein.

He recognized the talent of the sixteen-year-old Giorgio Vasari of Arezzo and supported him to study in Florence.

Even Giorgio Vasari, who did not think much of artists north of the Alps, praised it in his Le Vite and called it " a miracle in wood ", though misattributing it.

Between the first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and while the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art ( finally including Titian ) it did so without achieving a neutral point of view.

Ghirlandaio did not often attempt the nude — one of his pictures including nudes, Vulcan and His Assistants Forging Thunderbolts, was painted for Lorenzo II de ' Medici, but, as in the case of several others specified by Giorgio Vasari, no longer exists.

" In painting Alberti achieved nothing of any great importance or beauty ," wrote Vasari.

Writers such as Giorgio Vasari followed public opinion in judging the best painters above all on their production of large canvases of history painting, and artists continued for centuries to strive to make their reputation by producing such works, often neglecting genres to which their talents were better suited.

Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even " the most confident master ... despair and lose heart.

Francis Petrarch became a friend of Simone's while in Avignon, and two of Petrarch's sonnets ( Canzoniere 96 and 130 ) make reference to a portrait of Laura de Noves that Simone supposedly painted for the poet ( according to Vasari ).